Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

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that people need to carry out when building an ontology (Fernández, Gòmez-Pérez,
& Juristo, 1997). In other words, a flow of ontology development processes for three
different processes: management, technical, and supporting.
The ontology development process is composed of the following steps:
• Project management activities include:
� Planning: it identifies which tasks are to be performed, how they will
be arranged, how much time and what resources are needed for their
completion;
� Control: it guarantees that planned tasks are completed in the manner in
which they were intended to be performed;
� Quality.assurance: it assures that the quality of each and every product
output is satisfactory.
• Development oriented activities include:
� Specification: it states why the ontology is being built, what its intended
uses are, and who are the end-users;
� Conceptualization:. structures the domain knowledge as meaningful
models at the knowledge level;
� Formalization: transforms the conceptual model into a formal or semicomputable
model;
� Implementation: builds computable models in a computational language.
• Support activities include a series of activities performed at the same time as
development-oriented activities:
� Knowledge.acquisition;
� Evaluation: it makes a technical judgment of the ontologies, their associated
software environment, and documentation with respect to a frame
of reference;
� Integration;
� Documentation.
In Table 3, we provide a listing of the single phases of the previously mentioned
methodology. It is also worth depicting one fundamental fact about methontology:
its specific explicit avoidance to commit to the user’s interest in the development
of tools that automate all the phases.
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